Italys conservative leader Giorgia Meloni has overseen 64% plunge in illegal immigration, foreign minister boasts
Under Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the nation’s level of illegal immigration has plunged 64% after she cracked down hard on smugglers and worked with Italy’s neighbors to stop the flow, the country’s foreign minister boasted.Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Sunday that her success shows that enforcing tough border policies is possible — it just takes hard work.“It’s not easy.
We’ve worked hard to achieve this goal,” Tajani told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “We are very happy for this.We are not against legal immigration, rather against illegal immigration.”“We are working with an agreement with Tunisia, with Egypt, with Libya.
We are working with the North African countries for reducing the boats coming …[and] fighting against the crime.”Meloni’s policies had drawn mixed reactions in Europe, though newly minted UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer, a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, praised Italy’s policies on that front.Tajani stressed that Italy is aggressively working to clamp down on human trafficking as smugglers get paid to move desperate migrants across borders.
“Human traffickers are the most important part of crime.They are human traffickers, weapon traffickers, drug traffickers.
They [belong to] the same organization, but we need to be very strong and to fight against these organizations, and we are doing it,” Takani said.Meloni had reflected on the human trafficking crisis during an interview with Bartiromo last year.
“We have to fight the traffickers,” Meloni emphasized in that interview.“What the traffickers are doing is incredible.
These organizations are always becoming more powerful, and they use their power and the money they [have] against the state.”“We cannot allow a mafia to decide who’s coming into our countries.”Tajani, who is in the US ahead of the United Nations General Assembly’s session in Manhattan this week, mused...